Let’s Go Slash His Tires! | Travel Dating Diary - October 2025 (Part 9)
October did not bring the love of my life. The dates with three men, the tones of which ranged from “meh” to mildly anthropological curiosity, have left me feeling like it’s probably time to take a break from dating until it feels joyful again.
Instead, this month gifted me quality time with a girlfriend who taught me the power and importance of the energy of sheer violent revenge.
If you read ‘til the very end, a mystery from a previous chapter is solved. It’s very satisfying. Things in life are rarely so tidily wrapped up.
Blog Outline:
Comments and reflections from Part 8 (September 2025)
October Travel Dating Diary - dates and reflections on love and dating
Romance x Rail - Part 9 - October 2025
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Romance x Rail - Part 9 - October 2025 //
September Debrief
Some comments I received on Part 8:
“Your love letter to yourself is very profound and you are very generous to write one for the various dates.”
“I was drinking out of a water glass with the wordle word on it 🤣🤣…this has to be a simulation.”
“Beautiful writing Alison, bittersweet.”
“Wow! This is your best piece I’ve read! It was so honest and vulnerable. And kind, both to you and the dates. Beautiful. I could relate so much to your love letter, and it made me sad that this is probably how many women feel. It is really time for us to focus the caretaking on ourselves now. Thank you for the thoughts (and neuroscience) around sexting, it was intriguing and eye-opening. And I loved the new format of writing the dates a love letter. I’m just imagining doing it to friends now and it feels so scary and vulnerable! You are so brave and such an inspiration and a great friend ❤️.”
“I just finished your blog. Another masterpiece (ok the sex talk was maybe tmi for this old boomer--lol). I feel a grief for every love that doesn’t work out. [Lists them all with their nicknames lol]. No grief for Jean 1 though - lol [appreciated]. I want more answers! Why [aren’t they] ready for anything serious?”
“Love the subject matter and the curiosities and insights that it encourages and reveals in all of us. Keep exploring!”
Travel Route
I traveled from/to:
Innsbruck, Austria —> Bad Gastein, Austria - by rental car
Bad Gastein —> Vienna - by rental car
Vienna —> Tirana, Albania - flight
How long I was in each place:
Bad Gastein - 3 nights
Vienna - 1 week
Tirana, Albania - 1 month (into November)
Dates:
Bad Gastein - 0
Vienna - 0
Tirana, Albania - 3
Gjon 39 + Gjon 40, in-person (Albanians)
Giovanni 41, FaceTime (Italian)
Sacred Rage | Part 9: August 2025
Bad Gastein
No dates!
I was focused on getting as much trail time in as possible. I took a few days off from work to spend time exploring Hohe Tauern National Park. Check out my summary of that trip here with a photo tour.
Johann 38 and I texted a lot. I shared with him a screenshot of my hormonal cycle calendar (see the calendar below with my luteal cycle circled and a crying face drawn in)—something I’ve surprisingly never shared with a man before.
“I can hardly believe that you do cry a lot out of sadness. Your life seems so full and smart and enlightened and fun,” was the text he sent me in return.
I recognized this pedestal placement. I used to do this same thing to anyone I idealized. Before doing my healing work, I really thought that some people had a perfect life free of any discomfort, and some of us, like me, were hopelessly broken.
It was psychoanalyst Alice Miller who helped me see clearly that “The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings. It is part of the kaleidoscope of life that these feelings are not only happy, beautiful, or good but can reflect the entire range of human experience, including envy, jealousy, rage, disgust, greed, despair, and grief. But this freedom cannot be achieved if its childhood roots are cut off. Our access to the true self is possible only when we no longer have to be afraid of the intense emotional world of early childhood. Once we have experienced and become familiar with this world, it is no longer strange and threatening.”
The depression that plagued my adult life wasn’t about feeling too many negative emotions—it was about not feeling any emotions. When we turn the feelings spigot off to avoid hard feelings, we turn them off for the good ones and bad ones alike. Healing depression is about turning the water hose of emotions back on little by little, as we can tolerate them, until we feel “the entire range of human experience,” “the kaleidoscope.”
I love and cherish the time each month before the blood comes, when I feel sensitive and tears come easily. Feeling any feeling deeply is a blessing. It’s the stuff of being alive.
Despite the part of him that was idealizing me, when I shared with him my fears about my mom’s cancer, he responded in a perfectly nurturing way, holding space, and sending a gif from Monsters Inc with the words “big hug.” I appreciated it. He sent me well-wishes that the right treatment would come my mom’s way, which was really nice. Ultimately, a good partner would be someone to turn to in these difficult life moments. They offer comforting words and a big hug. That’s the dream, right? That’s why we keep reaching for somebody, trying to find someone despite failed attempt after failed attempt—the hope that we might find someone who feels comforting.
Horny, Crying, Cramping // Women’s Monthly Hormones
I use the Garmin app to track my monthly cycle. That’s what this screenshot is from.
Key:
The green days are when I’m ovulating. These are the HAPPY+HORNY days for women. “During this time, estrogen levels peak, causing a surge in luteinizing hormone (LH), which drives heightened sexual desire.” (source) “Estrogen is thought to affect the production of the ‘happy hormone’ serotonin.” (source) There’s also an increase in testosterone. Studies show that women dress sluttier these days. Pheromones are being sprayed in every direction during these days because men tend to stare at me more, regardless of what I’m wearing or whether I’ve done my hair and makeup that day, if I’m ovulating. “A growing body of evidence suggests that men may perceive women’s bodily odour to be more attractive during the high-fertility ovulatory phase than during other phases in the menstrual cycle.” (source) These are the days of the month when women can get pregnant.
For ladies who don’t use an app to track, you can tell you’re ovulating if your vaginal discharge has the texture of egg whites. This mucous is designed to facilitate the travel of the sperm all the way to the egg.
Green days are when I’m most excited to go on dates, chat with men on dating apps, and try sexting with a stranger. They are filled with unbridled hope and optimism.
The white box I’ve created with a crying face is the infamous luteal phase. This comes about a week after the horny phase. This is when estrogen drops. During the luteal days, I always feel extra sensitive and reflective. I tend to want comfort foods and deep conversations more than usual.
The luteal phase following ovulation is often followed by “Shit, shit, shit! Why am I chatting with all these mid-men on apps?? Who did I give my WhatsApp number to? Who do I need to cut off?” There’s a lot of boundary setting and “Oh, sorry, this isn’t going anywhere!” in this phase. I snap out of a sex-crazed stupor, reaping 10 open boring conversations with at least 3-5 of them thinking we’re going to meet for a date, and have to clean up the mess I sowed.
The purple days are my period, when the uterus sheds its bloody lining, the home it was making for a fertilized egg to nurture into a little human. These days, I feel bloated, tired, and experience pain from cramping, which happens because my uterus is trying to push all of the blood out of the body, and I guess, hasn’t gotten stronger over 27 years of once-a-month practice. I dunno. Seems like we shouldn’t cramp every time. Seems maladaptive. Seems like muscles should have gotten stronger over all that training.
Additionally, something called prostaglandins increases at this time to move the blood out, and they also have the effect of loosening stools, which means the period is often accompanied by diarrhea. Alllllll of these things mean I do not want to have sex on these days. And I mostly want to eat chocolate, drink warm beverages, take hot baths, and wallow a little bit. The intense period wallow is usually no longer than 2-3 days. Combined with the 4 days of pre-period crying, this is about 1 solid week of wallowing each cycle.
Intimately knowing my cycle has brought self-awareness and self-compassion. One relationship in my late 20s, I realized that we always had a major fight right before my period, and I even broke up with him for good during this luteal phase as well. I didn’t know much about the hormone changes then, nor how to regulate my emotions through the sometimes violent waves. I wish I had! I sabotaged many relationships in the past through not having emotional regulation tools. Tracking and knowing our hormonal cycles and how they affect us can help us know what we need and ask for what we need—a strong tool for mental health and relationships.
For dating, it’s important to know whether we might have rose colored glasses on during ovulation or gray colored glasses during luteal. This is why it’s so important to date slowly and spend time together over weeks and months before committing. Can it endure all our moods? Our horny days and crying days alike?
The “I just need the kind of hug that feels like oblivion” mood of my luteal phase, combined with feeling worried about my mom’s health, left me with a delusional feeling of closeness with Johann 38.
“Hey. I would love to see you again.” I texted him.
“Let’s make that happen.” He texted back.
And then, even though we had been texting rapid-fire all week, there was silence the rest of the day…and the following day…and the next.
“He’s not going to make that happen,” I thought. I knew it in my bones. “Hey, can we talk?” I texted. Let’s get this over with.
Indeed, he had been ruminating about this, as I suspected.
Vienna
After my mountain vacation, I got some deeply restorative time with my girlfriend KS, who was a Couchsurfer who stayed at the apartment I shared with friend JS, back in 2009. JS and I lived together in Berkeley from 2008 to 2009 as I wrapped up my undergraduate time and he started his career. Those were some of my happiest, most cherished years. He and I hosted “Couchsurfers,” travelers who contacted us via the Couchsurfing.com website to request staying with us for free. We decided to say yes to as many people as possible, and it was a riot! Many mornings, we would wake up and there would be bodies all over the living room: one on the couch, two on our inflatable queen mattress, maybe others tucked into corners. Once a week, we had a big bash with all our friends and the Couchsurfers they were hosting. The Couchsurfing official headquarters were located in Berkeley at that time, so sometimes we’d recruit strays from that big mansion to come to our place to party.
I would make dinner and invite people to bring home-made food. We always had a lot of cheap wine from Trader Joe’s available. One friend called it “the weekly AA meeting” because we drank so much. We called it Sauce because we all got saucy. We usually got more than saucy…but it was just perfect.
So that’s how I knew KS, and we’d stayed in touch over the years. People I know from that era are soul friends. Couchsurfing doesn’t really exist now the way it did then. And Airbnb monetized opening up our homes to strangers starting around 2011, ending a glorious era.
KS felt it was her turn to host me this time, 16 years later, and she helped me feel so at home! But now that we’re in our 40s, instead of a couch in a rented apartment, I got a guest room in the giant home she owns with her partner.
I took my work meetings in their guest room and during the hours I wasn’t working, she and I enjoyed leisurely cups of coffee and breakfasts over lots of great conversations about dating, relationships, parents and in-laws, the golden days of Couchsurfing, fitness, work/jobs, and of course, since it’s me after all, childhood trauma.
“Now that you’ve explained childhood trauma to me,” she texted me later,” I see it in everyone!” Whoops, sorry for that! You’ll never be able to unsee it now…
I brought her up to date on two years of dates, including the story of Jean 1, the Parisian photographer who stood me up on our first date in Part 1, wooed me back in Part 3, invited me into a committed relationship with him then broke my heart in Part 4, who then told me he had met someone else while we were still together in Part 5.
“I told him the most important thing to me was to have a baby and that I was trying to find a way to squeeze in an appointment to freeze my eggs or do IVF with donor sperm that Fall. I said if he wasn’t serious about us and my goals, I didn’t want to spend more time together. He assured me he was serious and had always wanted another kid (he had an 11-year-old son already). So I dove in and we fell in love. Then, a few months later, he told me that he hadn’t meant that at all and that he didn’t want another kid, and so we broke up. Then it turned out that what really happened was that he had met someone else at a Christmas party while we were still together. When I asked him if he had lied to me about wanting a child with me, he said he thought he could change my mind about it. THOUGHT HE COULD CHANGE MY MIND ABOUT THE THING I SAID WAS THE MOST IMPORTANT. IN THE LAST YEAR OF MY 30s, BEFORE MY FERTILITY DROPPED SIGNIFICANTLY.
Except the all-caps is emphasis I added now, after KS said to me, horrified, “You should be a LOT more angry about this! This is unforgivable. He’s a rat. He deserves revenge!”
She meant business. She started brainstorming. “I’m serious. What can we do? Can we send a bag of shit to his front door?” Oh wow. “Wait! Does he drive a car?” She looked excited about this new possibility. I nodded. “Let’s go slash his tires!”
I had to admit it would feel amazing to make him suffer since he kept all the power by not talking to me as we broke up, and then immediately found a new girlfriend.
“He used you! He wasted your time and energy! It’s unforgivable! He must suffer.”
This…this was all true. He didn’t stop and think about me as a person. He let his own childlike desires run the show without considering the harm he was causing. Then, when he was done, he simply discarded me.
Was my friend KS too bloodthirsty? Was it good to carry this much rage? Or did I not have enough anger? What’s the right amount of anger to feel?
I read a book years and years ago, The Gift of Anger: And Other Lessons from My Grandfather Mahatma Gandhi by Arun Gandhi. “Use your anger for good. Anger to people is like gas to the automobile - it fuels you to move forward and get to a better place. Without it, we would not be motivated to rise to a challenge. It is an energy that compels us to define what is just and unjust.”
Was it good to feel anger in this situation? What did it fuel?
In my last travel dating update for September, I explored dating with love and compassion for me and my dates. I wrote love letters to each date with the qualities that I admired in each of them, and the positive qualities they brought out in me. But were there things I should have been angry about? As I sit here, pondering, I can think of a few things. With Johann 37, he didn’t plan our dates with a place and time; I did, and yet I still went out with him. If I had let myself feel angry, I would have asked him for what I needed then instead of rolling with it and then feeling resentful after, which I did. The reason I don’t like to get angry, usually, is because I know that everyone has a story of childhood trauma that has given them their behaviors and habits. But can we have both compassion and sympathy for people’s trauma stories while holding them accountable for how their behaviors make us feel? And I think we can’t ask for accountability without first feeling some anger.
Lama Rod Owens, a Buddhist minister, explores the theme of love and anger in his aptly titled book, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger, “I believe anger is like a controlled fire. We do controlled fires in forests to create room and space for new growth and to fertilize the soil. But that fire can get out of control if there aren’t any skilled people there controlling that fire. For us, if we have no wisdom, then our anger gets out of control, and it starts burning up everything. I see so many people burning up everything.”
Anger is necessary fuel, but we want controlled burns. We don’t want it to spread and burn down the whole forest.
NonViolent Communication
One way to be productively angry is to utilize the NonViolent Communication method (NVC), which I discovered at age 21 when I was in a committed relationship and we kept getting into heated verbal fights. I’d just gotten out of rehab the previous year, where they taught us that there were all of these tools we never knew about that we could use in tense moments instead of reaching for our drug of choice. “There has got to be a communication tool I don’t know about,” I thought at the time. I think I Googled it, which was still a fairly new thing to do in 2006. I still remember going to the Borders bookstore in my hometown to pick it up, ready to figure out how to do this communication thing right.
That boyfriend and I worked hard to learn and practice the method, writing down the 4 steps on a notecard that we kept on hand for reference. Over time, we had fewer heated verbal fights. It worked!
It’s a way to take our raw emotions, define them, identify our core needs, and then invite someone else to care about us, our feelings, and our needs.
Now I train work teams in this method as a conflict resolution tool. I always show the following video in these training sessions:
Here are the 4 steps:
Name the thing that happened
Name the feeling using “I feel…”
Name the need
Make a request
As an example:
Hey. You tend to leave your clothes in piles all around the house.
I feel claustrophic when there’s so much clutter in the home that we share.
I feel more calm when there’s less clutter. I have a need to feel calm and at home when I’m here.
Do you think you could work on changing this habit? I’m happy to support you or figure it out together.
When we do it this way, we give the other person the opportunity to care about our feelings and needs. It creates shared humanity and lowers defensiveness. Maybe the other person realizes they have the same need to feel calm in a clean and tidy space and now the goal is shared. It also doesn’t paint the other person as selfish. People have different habits and it can be tough to negotiate which habits stay and go when we share spaces.
When Johann 38 and I talked by phone, he told me he was sorry for the confusion, but he’d visited me in Innsbruck with friendship, not romantic intentions.
Freshly armed with KS’s righteous indignation, I let myself feel angry. That was convenient—just throw your hands up helplessly and say, “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that.” Avoid any deeper conversation, any feelings, and any sense of reverence for the connection we’d so obviously experienced.
I remembered a teaching from the popular 90s book The Celestine Prophecy in which they talked about people’s control dramas. We all seek the feeling of safety through control. When we feel insecure, a pattern emerges to control people or the situation. Aloofness was one method of “control drama”. The other 3 are interrogation, victimhood, and intimidation. Aloofness was the one I related most to at the time I listened to the audiobook, in 2015, while driving around Florida, escaping the snowpocalypse that was New York City’s winter that year.
Aloofness is when we check out and pretend we aren’t paying attention or don’t care. For example, a woman married to a man who is molesting his stepchildren may be aloof because she needs him to keep paying the rent, or because she herself was molested as a kid and learned to mentally dissociate in those moments and pretend nothing was happening.
Or a romantic partner, such as Jean 1, may go aloof, saying, “Oh, I guess I didn’t realize you really meant it when you said that having a baby was the most important thing to you,” absolving himself of any responsibility for harmful actions. “Whoops, didn’t notice!”
Whether we choose interrogation, aloofness, victimhood, or intimidation, of course, has its roots in childhood. The pattern is how we learned to cope with stressful home life or less-than-optimal parent dynamics. They’re all related to not feeling safe staying grounded in the body and in reality. We go up into our heads and either space out (aloofness) or lash out, or make up a story.
Taking the aloof path, even if it’s the result of the person’s own childhood trauma and conditioning, is a control drama. By saying, “Whoops, sorry, I’m just a friend. You read into that too much,” he was passing all responsibility for any emotional labor off to me. “You’re just a crazy, needy woman,” was the implicit message.
Normally, I’d either go along with that narrative, feeling embarrassed. “Oh my gosh, what was I thinking, you’re so right…I’m just too much!” or feel compassion, “His wounds make intimacy difficult.”
But this time, I let myself feel angry in response to a long, aloof email. I pushed back in my response, letting him know that he could take accountability for avoiding emotional labor, and that his intentions didn’t mean as much as the impact of his behavior.
My angry email did not seem to bother him in the least, which, unfortunately, had the impact of making him more attractive.
“Share a vulnerable feeling,” my intuition was telling me. “It can’t just be ego against ego.”
So I mustered all my NVC training and practice and finally sent the text that ended things:
“I’m feeling hurt that you’re dismissing the romantic weekend we had together.”
Finally, he could just flatly say: “I don’t want this with you,” without trying to protect himself with stories about how he never wanted me anyway, so this was actually my fault.
At some point, we have to get past all the stories and get right down to the present moment. Despite all the intentions, this is the moment we find ourselves in, so what do we do with it?
I think the right answer is always: we feel our feelings. And if we’re feeling brave, we can share them with someone else.
The sooner we can drop into the feeling world and the place of soft-heartedness, of the present moment, the sooner we can get to the truth.
Anger as Grief
Common wisdom in therapy is that underneath anger is grief. When I look at my own anger lore, there’s a lot there.
Alice Miller explains in The Drama of the Gifted Child, “Depression consists of a denial of one’s own emotional reactions. This denial begins in the service of an absolutely essential adaptation during childhood and indicates a very early injury. There are many children who have not been free, right from the beginning, to experience the very simplest of feelings, such as discontent, anger, rage, pain, even hunger—and, of course, enjoyment of their own bodies.”
I remember feeling anger very often as a young child and then learning that it wasn’t a socially appropriate emotion—which in many ways is correct. All the way up until middle school I often let me anger out at my friends, which got me into trouble and didn’t make me very popular. I quickly learned that if I wanted friends, I would need to tamp it down.
And that’s a good thing—we don’t want to go around being angry at everyone—but unfortunately, instead of learning healthy outlets and how to let emotions pass, or instead of getting to the root of my anger, I turned all emotions off, becoming a weirdly cynical and disaffected teenager.
What would I grieve? I would grieve that I was such a serious kid and that I seemed to be so stressed out all of the time. The adults around me had emotional responses I couldn’t understand. There was often a sense of pervading injustice. The reactions by the adults to me just living my life as a kid seemed random and irrational, unfair.
The film Inside Out was made in consultation with UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner. It explores emotions with a cute character for each one: sadness, anger, joy, fear, and disgust. In an interview about the film:
“Filmmakers grappled with the purpose of sadness, but Keltner set them straight.
‘In our culture, we’re tough on sadness, but it’s a powerful trigger for seeking comfort and bonding,’ Keltner says. ‘Meanwhile, anger is often about the sense of being treated unfairly, and can be a motivator for social change.’”
The piece also said:
“In Keltner’s case, for example, the signature emotion during his youth was contempt, he says, which turned to fear and anxiety in adulthood, and has more recently evolved into compassion. Eventually, he’d like his signature emotion to be contentment.”
If I think back to the major emotion of my childhood, it would be: lonely.
What was yours?
I’d like to think that I’ve done a good job in adulthood to turn this emotional theme around. I feel exceptionally connected and loved.
But when it comes to allowing anger in, I think I need to grieve all the times I was not angry enough with men’s behavior. I always went to compassion first and my boundaries were not strong enough. It would be good to make a list—a grief over ignoring anger list, and go through the grieving process.
Bratislava - day trip
KS and I toured Bratislava one day and passed a bar called “After”. “Where do people come up with these names?” KS asked me, again with her signature righteous indignation. “Why, what’s wrong with it?” I said, thinking maybe it was for “after dinner” or something. “Well, it sounds okay in English, right? But guess what it means in German?”
I didn’t know.
“Butthole.”
Bratislava sits on the border with Austria, a German-speaking country. Oh yikes! Fail!
How many situations are there where we really need to get more input so that we can see the full context?
Getting input from my fiery friend KS this week—sharing all of my stories with her and letting her weigh in with her particular lens and wisdom—transformed me.
“You’re not angry enough.”
Her hunk of long-term partner of over a decade has a sweet and shy disposition. He confirmed, “You don’t know what she’s like. She fantasizes about committing violent acts of revenge all the time.” I could see the admiration in his eyes. It reminded me of this meme.
Maybe success on my path forward would involve equal parts compassion, per my last blog, and rage.
Tirana
While in Tirana I went on dates with two men. Both of these dates happened during “Green week” (ovulation). I then had a FaceTime date with someone in Italy.
Gjan 39 | Albanian | Early 30s | Bumble app
This was a pretty good date, but sparks did not fly. Gjan 39 and I chatted in a fun conversation on the apps. It transitioned easily into a date, and Gjan picked the place and time, which, although it should be the bare minimum, is impressive for some reason with the way dating is going in 2025.
We met at a nice place while he explained that a lot had changed in Tirana since he left home to attend University and grad school in Italy, then took a job in the Netherlands many years ago.
“In the 90s, when I was a kid, we didn’t even have a working government. We had communism until 1991, and it took a long time to recover and build something new.”
Indeed, if it feels like you’ve never really heard about Albania before British-Kosovoan-Albanian pop singer Dua Lipa got famous, that was on purpose. The cruel totalitarian leader made sure that no one could leave, and no one could come in, shrouding the country in isolated secrecy for decades.
I had gone on a date with an Albanian man one other time, in New York City in 2013. I had challenged myself to talk to strangers regularly when I moved there, and I saw a cute guy on the subway and approached him. “What game are you playing?” I said, nodding towards his phone. “Candy crush.” This was objectively not hot, but I kept the conversation going until he asked for my number.
When we met for our date and he said he was from Albania, my mind fogged over in puzzlement. “I guess it sounds like a made-up place,” I told him. I was confusing it with Elbonia, the made-up country in the popular 90s/2000s comic strip Dilbert about office life.
Anyway, sparks did not fly with Gjan 39. He seemed nervous and talked over me when I tried to join him in the conversation.
“[Suff about my life]…and then I moved to Amsterdam…”
“Oh! I lived in Amst…er…dam…” I tried to interject, but he didn’t notice and kept talking.
“I’m going to visit my brother in Vienna this week…” he continued
“Oh! I was just in Vienna until yesterday…” I wanted to say, and tried. But he didn’t notice and kept talking.
He did go on that trip to visit his brother. And he sent me great, cute photos of his nieces and nephews, which hit me hard. Why does everyone else get to find their person and have kids except me? Why do I keep going on dates with not my person??
I know what you’re going to say…I can have a baby without a man. I’ve thought about it long and hard, and I guess I just don’t really want to be a single parent.
He texted me when he got back to Tirana, but he didn’t set up a date. Last year, I put together a list of things I wouldn’t do in dating anymore. #9 is “picking up the slack”.
Gjan 40 | Albanian | Mid 30s | Bumble app
“Maybe I need to relax my strict standards on going for quantity over quality,” I thought. “Maybe I can’t really tell over app texting alone if they’re someone I would like.”
So I met with Gjon 40 even though I could tell from his photos that he wasn’t really my type.
He was a dark-featured, portly, well-dressed man of about equal height with serious brown eyes. His work was as a tour guide, mostly groups from Germany, he shared. “Omg, yes, I’m going to hear all about Albania!” I thought. “At least if nothing else, I’ll have this tour guide date.”
Except he didn’t want to share. He gave me one-word answers for everything, and seemed to intentionally dam up any conversational flow. It quickly became apparent that all his self-worth was tied up in being the overseer of information. If he let too much out, I’d steal his power from him. And so, trying to uncover his country's secrets felt like milking a dried-up cow, with one tedious drop taking a herculean effort to extract. I felt exhausted within minutes.
“You have no idea where you are,” he kept saying, with a Cheshire cat grin and blank, unfeeling eyes. He meant that I didn’t understand how beautiful this country is, with the beaches of sparkling water like Greece in the South, and the majestic gray mountains like Italy in the North. I certainly did not know! And he wasn’t going to the one to help me understand, weirdly.
Per my pledge not to overcompensate for my dates, I shut my mouth and just looked around the bar. It was cozy. An old house with rooms at different levels. Old movie posters and antique radios filled every square inch of space.
I looked around. I took photos. I gave our date time to breathe. Gosh, maybe he’ll ask me a question…
“So, tell me about yourself…” is what he finally mustered. WHICH IS NOT A FUCKING QUESTION.
“You’re going to have to get more specific,” I said back, grinning with blank eyes.
He sat in silence for a long time. At least a minute. His brain found a question somewhere way back in a dusty file cabinet.
“Why did you decide to come to Albania?”
This. This is not a question about me. This was him asking me to talk about his country. I was ready to pull my hair out.
I gave him one of his style of answers: “I had to leave Schengen.”
He looked at me. I looked at him.
I looked at my watch. It was 8:30 pm.
3 hours of time passed. I looked down at my watch again. 8:35.
At 8:45, he paid for our drinks, and we parted ways. There were no follow-up texts from either party.
QUALITY. We’re sticking with QUALITY. My screening system works.
I met 3 of my friends at 9 pm for dinner and drinks, and vented about the date. My night was redeemed when we, who were all digital nomads who met a few months earlier in Antalya, Turkey, shared our wildest travel stories. MV’s story got the most uproarious laughter when he shared about buying a chicken in India, and they grabbed a chicken that was running around and chopped its head off right then and there, which seemed surprising and chaotic. His Indian colleagues informed him, when he brought the bloody carcass back to them, that he had gone to the wrong shop. “Were they even selling chickens where I went??” We hooted and hollered, “Or did they just kill a chicken because we said we’d pay for one?”
I really love my fellow nomads.
Feminine Fury
On October 24th, a new feminine rage album was released: Lily Allen’s West End Girl. I was one of the many following her and her husband, Stranger Things actor David Harbour, after their adorable Vegas wedding photos were released in 2020. I loved her spunky take-no-shit music, and I liked his “tired-yet-hardworking-grumpy-yet-caring” schtick as Officer Jim Hopper on Stranger Things. I thought they were an odd couple, so I had kept my eye on them over the years, watching their now-infamous Architectural Digest tour of their glamorously maximalist Manhattan apartment in 2022.
When they split and it was revealed that he had been cheating on her for 3 years, I felt parasocially heartbroken on her behalf, I think, because behind her brazen song lyrics, she’s always seemed so soft and vulnerable. And maybe I felt a kinship with her recovery from addiction.
I put the album on. My first reaction was “Oh wow, she’s so specific!” Honestly, not unlike this dating blog I write. “Is she too bitter?” “Wait, am I too bitter?” Wait, omg why can’t women just be angry?? Why is everyone accusing us of being bitter?? I’ll share again this meme I shared a few blog chronicles ago: “hurting men’s feelings by saying what they did.”
After a couple of listens, I was hooked! It’s a brilliant, perfect album. Not one song is skipable, which is how I define “perfect” albums. She goes through every feeling at the news of his infidelity. Two standouts are Pussy Palace in which she realizes his second apartment wasn’t a “dojo,” or a space for him to do his man-things, but actually a “pussy palace,” where he’d sleep with other women. Another is Dallas Major, where she talks about being 40 with teenage kids on dating apps, under the pseudonym of Dallas Major.
My name is Dallas Major and I'm coming out to play
Looking for someone to have fun with while my husband walks away
I'm almost nearly forty, I'm just shy of five-foot-two
I'm a mum to teenage children, does that sound like fun to you?
'Cause I hate it here
I hate it here
Girrrrl, we feel you.
In the song Tennis she talks about the little moments that were clues, like “the way you grabbed your phone back.” When she says, “Who’s Madeline?” it's heart-wrenching. I’m still recovering from Jean 1 telling me he had met someone else at a party while we were still together. I had to put all the pieces together. Finally, it made sense why he wouldn’t talk to me that week—because she was over at his apartment. Such a punch in the stomach, feeling of betrayal, while also offering so much clarity, which was a relief.
On October 29th, Vogue published an article, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarassing Now?”
From Chanté’s piece:
“If someone so much as says “my boyf–” on social media, they’re muted. There’s nothing I hate more than following someone for fun, only for their content to become “my boyfriend”-ified suddenly. This is probably because, for so long, it felt like we were living in what one of my favorite Substackers calls Boyfriend Land: a world where women’s online identities centered around the lives of their partners, a situation rarely seen reversed. Women were rewarded for their ability to find and keep a man, with elevated social status and praise. It became even more suffocating when this could be leveraged on social media for engagement and, if you were serious enough, financial gain.”
This feels so true! Part of the grand brainwashing I mentioned in Part 7 about Wedding Dress Road.
Here are some of the notable TikToks I’ve seen since her article debuted, one from Chanté herself:
What a week for feminine rage!! Because we live in a patriarchy, men have felt okay lying, cheating, and abusing. We’re waking up.
Something is shifting, and it feels wonderful. We no longer need men as our access to economic enfranchisement. I understand why this transition into what we need is hard for them. But it also feels like some are clinging to old ways of entitlement and, as influencer Laura Danger calls it, “weaponized incompetence,” wanting to maintain their dominance. So, I want to balance, yes, compassion with anger.
One of my dates from September reached out to me, as you’ll read about below. I told him that he didn’t plan our dates, and I noticed it all, and it was part of the reason I ended things. I could practically see his hands going up, feigning unawareness. “It’s wrong no matter what I do, so I don’t try anymore,” he told me.
No, men, it’s not wrong whatever you do. We need you to show up as adults. We need you to follow established dating etiquette.
As I’m gearing up to head back to California for the winter, as I’ve done the past two years of nomading, I’ve had to make some key decisions about what to do with my life. I didn’t find a husband. I didn’t do IVF with donor sperm so no baby on the horizon. A project with a big work client is winding down. So, what do I want to do with my career? With my personal life? Where do I want to live?
I’ve reflected on it a lot and decided the following:
Work | I decided to move more towards 1:1 personal coaching for the moment and away from nonprofit consulting. I hired a marketing company to help generate regular leads, and I’ve been working hard with them for the past 3 weeks to get that set up. This will enable me to keep doing the work I love the most: coaching and teaching people how to regulate difficult emotions to help them meet their life goals while keeping me able to live and work abroad.
Location | I took time to sit with the places I enjoyed being the most. Last year it was Switzerland, and this year it was Innsbruck, Austria, both in the Alps. Why don’t I see if I can move to the mountains? I narrowed it down to Germany or Italy since Austria doesn’t have a digital nomad or self-employed visa. Both Germany and Italy offer paths to citizenship through visa renewal as long as you still meet the qualifications each year. I’ve narrowed my eyes on Northern Italy and will be visiting Trento, Bolzano, and Padua this November/December to see if I’m on the right track. I did some soul searching and realized I simply do not want to live in the United States. This is chiefly because of the city planning. I love walkable cities. But also, the food quality is better in Europe…and I guess I just feel better. I like it more. Getting an appointment with the Los Angeles Italian consulate is a PROJECT. Every night at midnight, they drop more new appointments, which are full months in advance. I’ve been logging on at exactly midnight in an attempt to snag one, but no luck yet.
Dating | My friend GS shared about a friend of his who did a similar project to mine and found her forever person on date #99. I’ve met around 30 men for dates, so I need to keep plugging along. Although I’m feeling discouraged, I’m telling myself that it’s okay to feel tired and discouraged. I can take a winter break in California and work on building my coaching business.
Baby | As I mentioned above, I’ve decided not to try to have a baby solo. So, I’ve been grieving the loss of that dream and envisioning a different life and what that will look like for the next 40 years.
Giovanni 41 | Italian | mid 30s | Hinge app
Since deciding to set my sights on Northern Italy, I set my Hinge location to Trento. I matched with a professional sports coach, and our chat was really nice. I could feel his enthusiasm for me, which felt like a nice change. I thought he was super handsome. I suggested a FaceTime date, and he was into it. We picked the next day, a Monday.
Monday came and was flying by with no message from Gio 41 to set up a specific time. I sent a wave emoji, which I guess violated my “no picking up the slack” rule. He apologized and said work was going later than he expected.
That’s an excuse because when has it ever been hard to text someone? Maybe in 2002.
We talked, and he seemed so nervous! He kept running his hands through his beard and hair. I tried hard to turn the timbre of the date around by asking engaging questions, flirting, and feeling centered despite his nervousness—to no avail.
If anything, he seemed to only get more nervous. He droned on and on about his career goals. Yet again, I felt left out of the conversation.
After the call, neither of us followed up by text.
Towards the end of the month, I got a surprise text from Johann 37 from September. Think way back. This is the guy who had an anxiety attack during our second date when all of his coworkers walked into the hamburger restaurant where we had just ordered our meals. The message was very clearly written with assistance from ChatGPT—you might also remember that his English wasn’t fluent.
👋 Hello Alison,
I hope you are doing well! 😃
I’ve been waiting a long time to read your blog post about me (Facebook suggested you to me 😅), and it was lovely. Thank you – I also thought the first date was wonderful. I'm sorry about how the second date went.
The Truth About the Second Date
If I can be honest: This is what happened:
Unfortunately, I developed a slight crush on a female colleague at work. Somehow I had the feeling she reciprocated, but I couldn't flirt with her because that would have led to complications.
The thing was: She was sitting right across from us that evening.
When I realized that, I completely forgot my English. I had too many thoughts in my head, and I felt anxious.
So, mystery solved. Boom. He had a crush on a coworker. I asked why he didn’t go for it with her since it was mutual, and he said that after she saw us that night, it was over. “Wow, he fumbled both of you!” my mom said when I gave her the update.
Was I angry about anything? I think I’m angry about continually dating men who come up with every sort of excuse for not wanting to move things forward, other than actually doing their emotional healing work.
“What do you even mean by emotional healing work?” my friend LH asked me. I answer that question in this blog: From Survival to Integration: What Healing Really Means.
But ultimately, I really appreciate him reaching out. We texted for a few days about why things ended between us, and it felt like good closure, even if I’m not entirely buying some of what he said.
“The great thing about you was that you live your life without pressure. That was truly nice, as I always experience this pressure here (kids, sex, relationship) – and it comes with stress. I know myself, and I want to meet someone who understands me the way you do!”
I clarified that the “without pressure” he felt from me was that I’m well-regulated and secure. This was a skill I’ve had to learn, practice, and develop. I very much feel a time pressure of wanting a relationship and kids, so this message stung—he wasn’t trying to get to know me, just projecting what he wanted me to be.
But it was the last part that stung the most. “I want to meet someone who understands me the way you do!” Goddamnit, I so want this in a partner, and I keep dating men who can’t or won’t or don’t see me. Yeah, I do see them. I’m very good at it. I’m present, attentive, and intuitive. Is there not even one man out there who can match me, see me, and know me?
Tallies
I forgot to add tallies to the end of Part 7 and 8, so this will encompass everyone from August to October:
Ivan 32 (phone/FaceTime dates)
Johann 36
Johann 37
Johann 38
Gjon 39
Gjon 40
Giovanni 41(FaceTime date)
Nationalities of the men I went on IRL (In Real Life) dates with:
Bulgarian - I
Italian - II
German - II
Albanian - II
Hair color of the men I went on IRL dates with (to establish whether I have a “type”):
Gray - I
Med-Dark Brown - II
Brown/Red - 0
Black - I
Blonde or Light Brown - III
Red - 0
Bald - 0
Did we kiss?
Yes - II
No - IIIII
How I connected with the men I went on IRL dates:
The League app - 0
Bumble app - IIIII I
In the wild (out in real life) - I
Hinge app - I
Average age:
36.2 (I’m 40, for reference)
Age range = 31-45
Height (I’m 5’10” or 178cm)
A lot taller than me - III
A bit taller than me - II
Same height as me - II
A bit shorter than me - 0
Quite a bit shorter - 0
Date asked me questions about myself while on the date:
Asked questions - IIII II
Didn’t ask questions - I
Date paid for the date:
Paid - IIII
We split it - I
I Paid - 0
No costs - II
